clay-man

I don't understand what's so hard about using 2 Variaxes, one with the problem, and one without it, and then swapping in hardware from the new one to the old one until the problem goes away. It'll narrow down everything and then they can work to eliminate or replace bad parts for people who send it into service centers. It's not that lollipoping hard. Eventually you'll run into whatever the hell causes the problem.

I've noticed the neutral + 89 pickups has less E string jangle (Not plink, though most likely related) than the Les Paul, so yes, you're right. It's annoying though. Another guitar body that muffles the E is the Firebird. I've noticed that the E string has a significant high end cut compared to the rest of the string on the Firebird body, especially noticeable when using other pickups besides the mini humbuckers. Chime also has no issue with the jangly sound on E. Telecaster isn't bad either, but the hugest offenders are the Les Paul and Strat models.

Would be great indeed. Level sliders in workbench are great for making pickups hotter, but obviously, there is a digital ceiling of how loud you can push it in it's bitdepth.

Didn't some guy fry his Variax doing that? Why would you try to tell someone that?

Like I said, it's sacrifice. Piezos = closer approximation to tones with weird hiccups because a piezo doesn't work like a magnetic pickup. Magnetic pickup = Loses some frequencies that could be useful for modeling. It really depends on how they make the magnetic pickup. Obviously there are great magnetic pickups for acoustic guitars, but magnetic pickups were never good on a broad frequency range. I honestly think the Roland guitar, which uses a magnetic GK pickup, has kinda meh sounding acoustic models. Electrics are probably a bit easier to pull off since making a magnetic pickup sound like a magnetic pickup is easier than making a magnetic pickup sound like the raw sound of an acoustic guitar. I personally wish that there was some way to get more consistent piezo hardware on the Variax guitars. No one in the world wants to hear a clank noise when they're picking the E string, it defeats the purpose of the guitar altogether.

No but seriously, the piezos are probably a large part of the models sounding as close as possible. If we are going to switch to magnetics like a Roland guitar, the quality would dip a bit, especially on the acoustics. Now, maybe Line 6 could model better than Roland on the magnetics and get a better sound, but if we ever go with magnetics, obviously they'd need to make magnetics for the sake of modeling. The whole point of them using piezos is to get as raw of a string sound as possible without any coloring from the pickup, but like you said, it has it's problems. Piezos don't act like magnetics, and they sit at a different position than a mag pickup, so we get some strange problems. It's why I laughed at Bias trying to make a "guitar modeling" app with just a regular guitar, because using a guitar's regular pickups to model is an absolute joke and is extremely limited. The same applies to Peavey Revalver's ACT module, which can pull off slight ballpark estimations of sounds, but you really have to kind of select the best pickup on your guitar to match the sound, plus, it doesn't sound good across the whole fretboard. Acoustic simulations sound lacking, like any other acoustic sim for an electric, hence why I said using magnetics might make acoustics suffer the most, depending on the quality of the magnetic pickups.

Lol no piezos. Say goodbye to the modeling then.

I've always said that the reason they keep a nylon string out is because they don't think it's possible to get a convincing nylon sound out of a steel string instrument. The thing about all the other models that the Variax models, is that it's all steel string instruments, so the base sound it needs to work off of is a steel string input, which is EXACTLY what the Variax works with to get it's sounds. I'm sure they could throw out something that's the closest steel string can sound as nylons, but they probably think it's still not good enough.

So you had your guitar for a year and it crapped out on you then? Any events that happened that could of caused this that you can remember, or did it just happen randomly? It's good that there's progress, but I agree, guitar should last WAAAAAAAAAAY longer, regardless if it's electronic or not. I don't buy a high end laptop to use it for 1 year. This is an issue with quality control.

It's one of the first things I went to and it helped, but it compromised magnetic pickups tone. Obviously it becomes less hotter and less warm when I back it off, so I have to find a balance. It helped a little but not dramatically.

The whole thing that got my into Variax guitars was the singer/guitarist from Thrice's Tele Variax. Sadly he sold it, because 1) he used an old Variax 2) Was annoying to maintain as a heavy gigging musician.

Actually, Workbench is the best way to go around making an "IR" or at least the convolution to how you want the guitar to sound. Like I said, how in the world would you approach applying an IR to the piezos and knowing what to get or how to get it? Sounds like trial and error, and I don't think that would be very productive for Line 6. Again, not enough memory to add something like this.

It's impossible with the current hardware and software. hardware- not enough memory. Think of the patches, they're just a bunch of variables, so it's just a list of numbers, so that file size is going to be pretty small. An impulse response caries a lot more data than that. Think of some of the cuts they had to make to the features of the guitar to make room for the HD modeling. You can't even factory reset the guitar anymore by itself. software- I'm pretty sure what you're asking for would require a complete rewrite of the guitar. While it's not a bad idea for creativity, it's not a good idea for line 6, because there's not really an audience they can really spawn out of "Oh hey you can make your own weird tone out of an IR" No one really has any technology where they can make an exact tone out of an IR and apply it to the piezos knowing what'll come out, and so it would be trial and error. Line 6 would ultimately need to develop a way to even build the IRs in reference to the guitar and what tone you're aiming for, which sounds like complicated technology, otherwise, like I said, we're back to not having a real audience for this thing.

Again, whole point of modeling is to have all of those features, and mags are meant to work as a regular guitar. Blending mags is just mixing the mags signal with the modeling, but you have to have modeling engaged.

The sweat from my hands rusts strings fast, so it's a no brainer to use elixirs. I tried Cleartones, but they're garbage as my sweat literally eats through the coating itself.

I used both, but try using poywebs. I don't think they sound dull at all. They sound much better than the overall tone my string will live through, because within a few days, the new sound of regular strings go away, while polywebs, is just 1 step below the sound of new strings but many steps above a set of regular strings after a half to a full week.

You have to remember that alt tuning on the modeling is basically 6 pitch shifters on each string. If you did a mix between mags and modeling, ultimately you'd have 7 pitch shifters, or actually, if you used a 12 string, I believe you'd have 13 pitch shifers. Imagine that, running 13 pitch shifters and 6 modeling algorithms. That's a crap load of processing. I say that, because i still needs separate pitch shifters to duplicate each string into an octave higher pitch, or/and whatever you have the cent put at, and then when you add alt tuning, it has to pitch shift the processed strings again, and then, somewhere within the process, whether before the pitch shifting and after, it has to do the modeling process. Also, it's impossible to do an alt tuning that's not in some kind of standard tuning (E, D, C, whatever as long as it's something standard), because you cannot separate the magnetics into 6 channels, obviously. If you're plugging your guitar into a helix, just use a pitch shifter module on your mags. Sucks? Maybe. But you need to use an external pitch shifter for the mags.

People have reported the issue on the guitar sadly. I was hoping that the graphtech piezos which pride theirselves to advertise that their piezos "compress and naturally fight piezo quack" would mean the problem wouldn't be present on these guitars. It's a hit or miss. Order from a place that'll let you swap your JTV guitars for a good one if you receive a bad one.

So if I wanted to use the same amp for clean and distortion without having to throw in too much boosts, I could just straight up have a snapshot of it on different gain/volume/etc settings to have a clean and distorted sound? That would be really awesome, and I think it helps not have to waste another patch that's just a duplicate with different settings.

Explain Snapshots and how they're different from presets. From my understanding, it basically takes the same stuff in the preset and tweaks all the parameters to different settings. Yes/No?

Just remember, MAGS = REGULAR GUITAR. REGULAR GUITAR = NO PROCESSING ALT TUNING/ PITCH SHIFTING = PROCESSING the whole point of the magnetic pickups was to have a bare-normal guitar side to the Variax, which means, if you have a 69, it's a Strat, if you have a 59, it's a Les Paul, if you have a 89, you have a super strat. Now, would it be cool to have a pitch shifter on the magnetics? Totally. Would it ruin the point of not needing a battery to use the magnetics? Yes. Could there have been some kind of way for them to feed the mags through a processor while the battery was in? Yes, but you need to ask yourself, why do that, when the whole point of the Variax side is to do that for you? If you want the Variax futures, use the Variax side.

download line6 monkey and it should show up as a download option when you plug your variax into your computer via workbench interface

Like I said, modeling has pretty much no difference. The only people that can hear a difference are probably audiophile hipsters who think they have the hearing of a bat. The only thing that's going to be different modeling-wise is that, 1/4 is running through a D/A converter, while VDI, it bypasses that and feeds the digital signal to the POD straight, kinda like a SPDIF cable. What I was talking about with the magnetics though, is the fact that it runs through without any cable resistance, and someone even suggested that your pickups become kind of active through the VDI circuit, which causes them to become a whole lot brighter. I noticed this when comparing mags to modeling. modeling sounds closer to mags in 1/4, then the mags sound brighter than the modeling via VDI.

Honestly if you can't hear the difference in the mags VDI vs 1/4, you're going deaf. If we're talking about the modeling alone, there is no difference. VDI makes the magnetics more brighter than usual. This is coming from a guy that thinks flac files are stupid and that mp3s suffice btw. You guys could be just talking about the models I guess.

Yeah, can't he do anything about it? Wasn't this a "line 6 authorized" place? I'd be having my boot far up L6's lollipop and out their mouth if they weren't going to do anything about something like that.